GL BAJAJ INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT AND RESEARCH

GREATER NOIDA

2019

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the award

of the degree of Post Graduate Diploma in Management.

Submitted by-Manish Joshi

Roll no-18119
Q1) Discuss the importance of Analytics for Business Decision Making. How the Big Data

Analytics affects the strategies of modern businesses? Discuss with example.

Definition:

It can be defined as the study of data through operational and statistical analysis,
application of optimization techniques, the formation of predictive models, and
communicating these results to business partners, customers, and college
executives. It leverages evidence-based data and quantitative methods for decision
making and business modeling.

Importance of Business Analytics

1. It is a procedure to make a sound commercial decision. It impacts the functioning

of the whole organization. Therefore, it can help in improving the profitability of the
organization, boost its market share and revenue, and provide a better return on
investment.

2. Helps in understanding the available primary and secondary data more

comprehensively, which, in turn, affects the operational efficiency of several
departments in the organization.

3. Helps in having a competitive edge. It incorporates the data available with several
thought models to enhance business decisions.

4. It converts available data into valuable information and helps in attaining the
desired outcome and positive results for the organization.

There is a stagnation of processes when an organization makes a wrong move. That

wrong move could be a delay in making decisions due to the lack of information or
proposing an alien idea due to the availability of fewer data. This is where the
importance of business analytics is realized.

Advantage of Business Analytics for business Decision

Helps in curtailing risks

This is one of the most important reasons behind the growing importance of business
analytics. It helps in making the right choices based on factors like customer
preferences, changing trends, and performances. This, in turn, can help organizations
to avoid risks in the short and long term.

Helps in accurate decision making

It makes the decision-making process more accurate as it helps in understanding the
sentiments of the customers towards the company, its brand, and products. With
efficiency in decision making, the organization can stay on top of their competitors.
This is one of the most useful advantages of business analytics.

Helps in achieving efficiency

With the advent of business analytics, the efficiency for businesses has been
consistently improving. This is one of the significant advantages of business
analytics. The importance of business analytics lies in the fact that it helps in
gathering a large volume of data at a much faster rate and present it in a visually
captivating way. This way, companies can achieve specified goals with better choices
on matters like how and where to take the business.

Helps in gaining valuable insights

This is one of the most remarkable advantages of business analytics since it helps in
taking care of how the data is presented to the analytics team. There are various
options like graphs and comprehensive charts that help to make decision-making
more interesting.

 Affect of BIG Data on Modern Business

Using and understanding big data is a crucial competitive advantage for leading corporations. To the
extent companies can collect more data from existing infrastructure and clients will give them the
opportunity to discover hidden insights that their competitors don’t have access to.

Big data can present an abundance of new growth opportunities, from internal insights to front-facing
customer interactions. Three major business opportunities include: automation, in-depth insights, and
data-driven decision making.

Automation

Big data has the potential to improve internal efficiencies and operations through robotic process
automation. Huge amounts of real-time data can be immediately analyzed and built into business
processes for automated decision making. With scalable IT infrastructure and decreasing cloud
computing costs, automating data collection and storage is within reach.

In-depth insights

Big data can also be used to discover hidden opportunities that were unknown to organizations before the
ability to review large sets of data. Complex data sets can even be used to develop new products or
enhance existing ones. Proprietary data within the market can prove invaluable in the competitive
landscape.

Faster, better decision making

With the speed of data analytics technology, paired with the ability to analyze new sources of data,
businesses are now able to analyze information instantly and make smart, informed decisions.
Example:

 PepsiCo is a consumer packaged goods company that relies on huge volumes of data for
an efficient supply chain management. The company is committed to ensuring they
replenish the retailers’ shelves with appropriate volumes and types of products. The
company’s clients provide reports that include their warehouse inventory and the POS
inventory to the company, and this data is used to reconcile and forecast the production
and shipment needs. This way, the company ensures retailers have the right products, in
the right volumes and at the right time. Listen to this webinar where the company’s
Customer Supply Chain Analyst talks about the importance of big data analytics in
PepsiCo Supply chain.

 Netflix is also a good example of a big brand that uses big data analytics for targeted
advertising. With over 100 million subscribers, the company collects huge data, which is
the key to achieving the industry status Netflix boosts. If you are a subscriber, you are
familiar to how they send you suggestions of the next movie you should watch. Basically,
this is done using your past search and watch data. This data is used to give them insights
on what interests the subscriber most. See the screenshot below showing how Netflix
gathers big data.

Q2) Describe the following Data Cleaning and Data Integration functions used in MS-Excel
with suitable example:

1. Concatenate, Trim, Lower/ Upper

 2. Import from MS-Access Database and MS-Excel

3. Remove Duplicates

4. Date/ Time Formatting

5. Vlookup, Hlookup

Answer:

1.1. Concatenate

In essence, there are two ways to combine data in Excel spreadsheets:

 Merge cells
 Concatenate cells' values

When you merge cells, you "physically" merge two or more cells into a single cell. As a result,
you have one larger cell that is displayed across multiple rows and/or columns in your
worksheet.

When you concatenate cells in Excel, you combine only the contents of those cells. In other
words, concatenation in Excel is the process of joining two or more values together. This method
is often used to combine a few pieces of text that reside in different cells (technically, these are
called text strings or simply strings) or insert a formula-calculated value in the middle of some
text.

Example:

1. Select a cell where you want to enter the formula.

2. Type =CONCATENATE ( in that cell or in the formula bar)
3. Press and hold Ctrl and click on each cell you want to concatenate.
4. Release the Ctrl button, type the closing parenthesis in the formula bar and press Enter.

1.2 Trim
The Microsoft Excel TRIM function returns a text value with the leading and trailing spaces
removed. You can also use the TRIM function to remove unnecessary spaces between words in a
string.
Syntax: TRIM( )

1.3 Lower/Upper

=UPPER(A1)
The above formula would convert all text in A1 to upper case. For instance, assume that you
have song titles in column A. You would like all the titles to be in upper case. We will put the
upper case titles in column C
=LOWER(A1)
Use the LOWER function to convert all letters in a text string to lowercase.

2. Import from MS-Access Database and MS-Excel

We can use Office Excel 2010, the spreadsheet software from Microsoft, to create complex
documents that can contain tables. Access 2010, the database software from Microsoft, also
contains tables.
If you want to convert Excel documents to Microsoft Access you can import the Excel files into
Access using its easy to use Spreadsheet Wizard feature. Because both programs are developed
by Microsoft, formatting is well preserved when your convert from one to the other.
Example and Steps:
1. Launch Access 2010 on your computer.
2. Click "File" at the top of the Access window and select "Open."
3. Select your database using the resulting file browser and click "Open" to open it in Access.
4. Click the "External Data" tab at the top of the Access window.
5. Click "Excel" to import the Excel document into your database. The Get External Data - Excel
Spreadsheet window pops up.
6. Click the "Browse" button at the top of the window and use the resulting file browser to select
the Excel document.
7. Click the "Import the source data into a new table in the current database" radio button to
create a new table using the data imported from the Excel document. You can also click the
"Append a copy of the records to the table" radio button and select a table if you want to insert
the Excel data into an existing table.
8. Click "OK" and the Import Spreadsheet Wizard window pops up.
9. Select an Excel worksheet to convert to Microsoft Access and click "Next."
10. Place a check mark in front of the First Row Contains Column Headings option if the first
row of your Excel document contains column headings. Click "Next."
11. Select each field and type a name for it in the Field Name text box and select a data type in
the Data Type drop-down box. Click "Next."
12. Click "Next" to allow Microsoft Access to add a primary key, which is a unique table
identifier, to your table.
13. Click "Finish" to import the data from the Excel document.
14. Click "Close" to close the wizard.

3. Remove Duplicates

1. Click any single cell inside the data set.

2. On the Data tab, in the Data Tools group, click Remove Duplicates.

3. Leave all check boxes checked and click OK

Result. Excel removes all identical rows (blue) except for the first identical row found (yellow).

4. Date/ Time Formatting

Dates and times in Excel can be displayed in a variety of ways. To apply a Date or Time format,

execute the following steps.
1. Select cell A1.

2. Right click, and then click Format Cells.

3. In the Category list, select Date, and select a Date format.

4. Click OK.

Note: to apply a Time format, in the Category list, select Time.

5. Dates are stored as numbers in Excel and count the number of days since January 0, 1900.
Times are handled internally as numbers between 0 and 1. To clearly see this, change the number
format of cell A1, B1 and C1 to General.

Note: apparently, 42544 days after January 0, 1900 is the same as June 23, 2016. 6:00 is
represented as 0.25 (quarter through the day).

6. You can enter times as 6:00, but Excel displays this time as 6:00:00 AM in the formula bar.
AM is used for times in the night and morning. PM is used for times in the afternoon and
evening.

7. Change the number format of cell C1 to Date only.

Note: cell C1 still contains the number 42544.25. We only changed the appearance of the
number, not the number itself.
 8. Finally, if you cannot find the right date or time format, create a custom date or time format

5. Vlookup, Hlookup

HLOOKUP and VLOOKUP are functions in Microsoft

Excel that allow you to use a section of your spreadsheet as
a lookup table

5.1 VLOOKUP

To build the VLOOKUP syntax:

1. The value you want to look up, also called the lookup value.
2. The range where the lookup value is located. Remember that the lookup value should
always be in the first column in the range for VLOOKUP to work correctly. For example, if your
lookup value is in cell C2 then your range should start with C.
3. The column number in the range that contains the return value. For example, if you
specify B2:D11 as the range, you should count B as the first column, C as the second, and so on.
4. Optionally, you can specify TRUE if you want an approximate match or FALSE if you
want an exact match of the return value. If you don't specify anything, the default value will
always be TRUE or approximate match.

Now put all of the above together as follows:

=VLOOKUP (lookup value, range containing the lookup value, the column number in the range
containing the return value, Approximate match (TRUE) or Exact match (FALSE)).

5.2 Hlookup

HLOOKUP is an Excel function to lookup and retrieve data from a specific row in table. The
"H" in HLOOKUP stands for "horizontal", where lookup values appear in the first row of the
table, moving horizontally to the right. HLOOKUP supports approximate and exact matching,
and wildcards (* ?) for finding partial matches.
Purpose
Look up a value in a table by matching on the first row
Return value
The matched value from a table.
Syntax
=HLOOKUP (value, table, row_index, [range_lookup])